Much of the philosophical work on perception has focused on vision, with very little discussion of the chemical senses—olfaction and gustation. In this paper, I consider the challenge that olfactory experience presents to upholding a representational view of the sense modalities. Given the phenomenology of olfactory experience, it is difficult to see what a representational view of it would be like. Olfaction, then, presents an important challenge for representational theories to overcome. In this paper, I take on this challenge and (...) argue for a representational account of olfactory experience that honors its phenomenology. (shrink)

Much of the philosophical work on perception has focused on vision. Recently, however, philosophers have begun to correct this ‘tunnel vision’ by considering other modalities. Nevertheless, relatively little has been written about the chemical senses—olfaction and gustation. The focus of this paper is olfaction. In this paper, I consider the question: does human olfactory experience represents objects as thus and so? If we take visual experience as the paradigm of how experience can achieve object representation, we might think that the (...) answer to this question is no. I argue that olfactory experience does indeed represent objects—just not in a way that is easily read from the dominant visual case. (shrink)

In philosophical discussions of the secondary qualities, color has taken center stage. Smells, tastes, sounds, and feels have been treated, by and large, as mere accessories to colors. We are, as it is said, visual creatures. This, at least, has been the working assumption in the philosophy of perception and in those metaphysical discussions about the nature of the secondary qualities. The result has been a scarcity of work on the “other” secondary qualities. In this paper, I take smells and (...) place them front and center. I ask: What are smells? For many philosophers, the view that colors can be explained in purely physicalistic terms has seemed very appealing. In the case of smells, this kind of nonrelational view has seemed much less appealing. Philosophers have been drawn to versions of relationalism—the view that the nature of smells must be explained (at least in part) in terms of the effects they have on perceivers. In this paper, I consider a contemporary argument for this view. I argue that nonrelationalist views of smell have little to fear from this argument. (shrink)

We can learn much about perceptual experience by thinking about how it can mislead us. In this paper, I explore whether, and how, olfactory experience can mislead. I argue that, in the case of olfactory experience, the traditional distinction between illusion and hallucination does not apply. Integral to the traditional distinction is a notion of ‘object-failure’—the failure of an experience to present objects accurately. I argue that there are no such presented objects in olfactory experience. As a result, olfactory experience (...) can only mislead by means of a kind of property hallucination. The implications of my arguments are twofold. First, we see that accounts of representational content cannot always be based on the visual model. And, secondly, we see that we must recast the notion of nonveridicality, allowing for a notion of non-veridical experience that is disengaged from any particular object. (shrink)

Seattle rain smelled different from New Orleans rain…. New Orleans rain smelled of sulfur and hibiscus, trumpet metal, thunder, and sweat. Seattle rain, the widespread rain of the Great Northwest, smelled of green ice and sumi ink, of geology and silence and minnow breath.— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug PerfumeMuch of the philosophical literature on perception has focused on vision. This is not surprising, given that vision holds for us a certain prestige. Our visual experience is incredibly rich, offering up a mosaic (...) of apparent three-dimensional objects. For this reason, it is commonplace to suppose that visual experience is world-directed, with the view taking its most popular form in the representational, or content, view. World-directed views contrast with what we might call subjectivist views — views according to which experiences are raw feels or mere sensations. (shrink)

Much of the philosophical work on perception has focused on vision. Recently, however, philosophers have begun to correct this ‘tunnel vision’ by considering other modalities. Nevertheless, relatively little has been written about the chemical senses—olfaction and gustation. The focus of this paper is olfaction. In light of new physiological and psychophysical research on olfaction, I consider whether olfactory experience is object-based. In particular, I explore the claim that “odor objects” constitute sensory individuals. It isn’t obvious—at least at the outset—whether they (...) meet the widely accepted principles of object individuation and recognition at work in the visual and auditory cases. Among the general issues I consider, then, is whether these traditional principles form necessary, or simply sufficient, conditions on object perception. As we see, at the very least, considering the object-recognition model of olfaction challenges us to look more closely at well-entrenched models of object perception. But the payoff of doing so is high. We not only learn something about a modality that philosophers have historically neglected; by asking new questions and challenging old assumptions, we also further our understanding of perception in general. (shrink)

In "What the Nose Doesn't Know", I argue that there are no olfactory illusions. Central to the traditional notions of illusion and hallucination is a notion of object-failure—the failure of an experience to represent particular objects. Because there are no presented objects in the case of olfactory experience, I argue that the traditional ways of categorizing non-veridical experience do not apply to the olfactory case. In their place, I propose a novel notion of non-veridical experience for the olfactory case. In (...) his (2011), Stevenson responds to my claim that there are no olfactory illusions. Although he agrees that it is natural—or at least commonplace—to think there are no olfactory illusions, he argues that there are and provides examples of them, many of which he suggests have analogues in the visual and auditory domains. In this paper, I examine the nature of the disagreement between us. I argue that Stevenson fails to argue against my conclusion that there are no olfactory illusions. (shrink)

This paper considers what olfactory experience can tell us about the controversy over qualia and, in particular, the debate that focuses on the alleged transparency of experience. The appeal to transparency is supposed to show that there are no qualia—intrinsic, non-intentional and directly accessible properties of experience that determine phenomenal character. It is most commonly used to motivate intentionalism—namely, the view that the phenomenal character of an experience is exhausted by its representational content. Although some philosophers claim that transparency holds (...) for all of the sense modalities, any detailed discussion of it focuses on vision. But transparency seems unintuitive for olfactory experience. This paper argues that olfactory experience is indeed transparent and that explanations of what transparency is have been obscured by a reliance on the visual model. In this way, the paper clarifies and advances the debate about transparency. (shrink)

The philosophy of perception has been dominated by vision, with very little discussion of the chemical senses – olfaction and gustation. In this second entry of a pair on olfactory experience, I consider what olfaction has to tell us about two issues: the nature of perceptual objects and the nature of perceptual properties and, in particular, the secondary qualities. Given the scant work on olfaction in the philosophical literature, my discussion not only surveys what philosophers have said about olfaction so (...) far, but considers the most plausible views and/or most pressing questions in each area of inquiry. (shrink)

Much of the philosophical work on perception has focused on vision. Recently, however, philosophers have been turning their attention to the ‘other modalities’. In a pair of entries, I consider olfaction—a sense modality that, along with gustation, has been largely overlooked by philosophers. In this first entry, I consider the challenge that olfactory experience presents to upholding a representational view of the sense modalities. It is common for philosophers to think that visual experience is world‐directed and, in particular, that it (...) is representational. World‐directed views contrast with subjectivist views—views according to which experiences are raw feels or mere sensations. Unlike visual experience, olfactory experience doesn't obviously support a representational view. Indeed, given its phenomenology, a subjectivist view of olfactory experience might seem unavoidable. But it is not. Once we begin to unravel ourselves from the dominant visual model of perception, we see that there is a representational view available that honors the phenomenology of olfactory experience. In turn, we learn that although there are some basic similarities between visual experience and olfactory experience, there are significant differences that prevent us from making easy generalizations from the visual case. (shrink)

In this paper, we present new cases of illusion and hallucination that have not heretofore been identified. We argue that such cases show that the traditional accounts of illusion and hallucination are incorrect because they do not identify all of the cases of non-veridical experience that they need to and they elide important differences between cases. In light of this, we present new and exhaustive definitions of illusion and hallucination. First, we explicate the traditional accounts of illusion and hallucination. We (...) then proceed to outline cases of pure property experience—that is, experience as of properties, but not as of objects. We suggest that some might find it to be plausible that olfactory experience is of this kind. We argue that, within instances of such pure property experience, one can identify cases of veridical property perception, illusory property perception and hallucinatory property experience. With these distinctions in hand, we re-examine ordinary cases of experiences as of objects having properties. Drawing on the ideas uncovered by considering pure property experience, we bring to light many new cases of illusion and hallucination within ordinary experience as of objects having properties. These consist in different combinations of veridical perception, illusory perception and hallucination of both objects and properties. In order to accept that these new cases of illusion and hallucination exist in ordinary experience as of objects having properties, nothing turns on accepting the idea that there is pure property experience, or that olfactory experience is an instance of it. Such a conception of experience is simply a tool—a ladder to gain a good vantage point from which one can appreciate that there are these further cases. But this is a ladder that, as Wittgenstein might say, can be thrown away once it is used. Identifying new instances of illusion and hallucination provides much needed, important data for testing theories of experience and perception—theories that are frequently motivated, and should be judged, by their ability to account for cases of illusion and hallucination. (shrink)

In this essay, I review Matthew Fulkerson's The First Sense: A Philosophical Study of the Sense of Touch. In this first philosophical book on the sense of touch, Fulkerson provides an account of the nature and content of tactual experience. Central to Fulkerson's view is the claim that exploratory action plays a fundamental role in touch. In this review, I put pressure on two of his arguments: the argument that tactual experience is unisensory and the argument that tactual experience does (...) not depend on explicit bodily awareness. (shrink)

The study of perception and the role of the senses have recently risen to prominence in philosophy and are now a major area of study and research. However, the philosophical history of the senses remains a relatively neglected subject. Moving beyond the current philosophical canon, this outstanding collection offers a wide-ranging and diverse philosophical exploration of the senses, from the classical period to the present day. Written by a team of international contributors, it is divided into six parts: -/- Perception (...) from Non-Western Perspectives Perception in the Ancient Period Perception in the Medieval Latin/Arabic Period Perception in the Early Modern Period Perception in the Post-Kantian Period Perception in the Contemporary Period. The volume challenges conventional philosophical study of perception by covering a wide range of significant, as well as hitherto overlooked, topics, such as perceptual judgment, temporal and motion illusions, mirror and picture perception, animal senses and cross-modal integration. By investigating the history of the senses in thinkers such as Plotinus, Auriol, Berkeley and Cavendish; and considering the history of the senses in diverse philosophical traditions, including Chinese, Indian, Byzantine, Greek and Latin it brings a fresh approach to studying the history of philosophy itself. -/- Including a thorough introduction as well as introductions to each section by the editors, The Senses and the History of Philosophy is essential reading for students and researchers in the history of philosophy, perception, philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, aesthetics and eastern and non-western philosophy. It will also be extremely useful for those in related disciplines such as psychology, religion, sociology, intellectual history and cognitive sciences. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that because animals feel pain we should not make them suffer gratuitously. Some ethical theories go even further: because of the capacities that they possess, animals have the right not to be harmed or killed. These views concern what not to do to animals, but we also face questions about when we should, and should not, assist animals that are hungry or distressed. Should we feed a starving stray kitten? And if so, does this commit us, (...) if we are to be consistent, to feeding wild animals during a hard winter? In this controversial book, Clare Palmer advances a theory that claims, with respect to assisting animals, that what is owed to one is not necessarily owed to all, even if animals share similar psychological capacities. Context, history, and relation can be critical ethical factors. If animals live independently in the wild, their fate is not any of our moral business. Yet if humans create dependent animals, or destroy their habitats, we may have a responsibility to assist them. Such arguments are familiar in human cases-we think that parents have special obligations to their children, for example, or that some groups owe reparations to others. Palmer develops such relational concerns in the context of wild animals, domesticated animals, and urban scavengers, arguing that different contexts can create different moral relationships. (shrink)

This paper sets out the case for abolishing state-recognized marriage and replacing it with piecemeal regulation of personal relationships. It starts by analysing feminist objections to traditional marriage, and argues that the various feminist critiques can best be reconciled and answered by the abolition of state-recognized marriage. The paper then considers the ideal form of state regulation of personal relationships. Contra other recent proposals, equality and liberty are not best served by the creation of a new holistic status, such as (...) civil union, nor by leaving regulation to private contracts. Instead, the state should develop piecemeal regulations that apply universally. (shrink)

'Philosophy in a world of women. I reflected, talking with Mary, Pip and Elizabeth, how much I love them.' Two brilliant young scholars uncover the major philosophical contributions of four women whose ideas could have changed the course of twentieth-century thought. Written with energy, expertise and panache, The Quartet is a page-turning blend of research and recovery, storytelling, and a call to arms. Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Elizabeth Anscombe were great friends and comrades in the intellectual trenches, (...) rethinking the possibilities of moral philosophy when the men 'left the room' and taking on the establishment, ultimately embodied by President Truman. Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman bring these women out of the shadows and into vivid colour. (shrink)

Health institutions recommend that young infants be exclusively breastfed on demand, and it is widely held that parents who can breastfeed have an obligation to do so. This has been challenged in recent philosophical work, especially by Fiona Woollard. Woollard’s work critically engages with two distinct views of parental obligation that might ground such an obligation—based on maximal benefit and avoidance of significant harm—to reject an obligation to breastfeed. While agreeing with Woollard’s substantive conclusion, this paper (drawing on philosophical discussion (...) of the ‘right to rear’) argues that there are several more moderate views of parental obligation which might also be thought to ground parental obligation. We first show that an obligation to breastfeed might result not from a general obligation to maximally benefit one’s child, but from what we call ‘choice-specific’ obligations to maximise benefit within particular activities. We then develop this idea through two views of parental obligation—the Dual Interest view, and the Best Custodian view—to ground an obligation to exclusively breastfeed on demand, before showing how both these more moderate views fail. Finally, we argue that not only is there no general obligation to breastfeed children, but that it is often morally right not to do so. Since much advice from health institutions on this issue implies that exclusive breastfeeding on demand is the best option for all families, our argument drives the feeding debate forward by showing that this advice often misrepresents parents’ moral obligations in potentially harmful ways. (shrink)

Teacher Subject Identity in Professional Practicefocuses on a key, but neglected, element of a teacher's identity: that of their subject expertise.Studies of teachers' professional practice have shown the importance of a teacher's identity and the extent to which it can affect their resilience, commitment and ultimately their effectiveness. Drawing upon narrative research undertaken with a range of teachers over a period of 14 years, the book explores how subject expertise can play a significant role in teacher identity, acting as a (...) professional compass guiding teachers at all levels of their professional practice. It reveals powerful individual stories of meaning-making which highlight the dynamic importance of teachers' subject expertise The book's metaphor of a professional compass goes to the heart of teacher professionalism, and provides a valuable mechanism to enable teachers to respond to challenges they face in their daily practice. It enables teachers to consider the moral dimensions of their practice, and can constitute a significant component in professional formation and identity. Throughout the book the importance of subject expertise for teachers' professional practice is explored at a range of scales: from the classroom to broad education policy, and at different stages of a teacher's career which offers readers a deeper understanding of the importance of subject expertise for teachers. Teacher Subject Identity in Professional Practicemakes a significant contribution to an under-researched area. It identifies the role and significance of teachers' subject expertise as a dimension of their teacher identity. The book is key reading for teacher educators, policy makers and researchers with an interest in teachers' professional development and practice. (shrink)

Contract cheating, or plagiarism via paid ghostwriting, is a significant academic ethical issue, especially as reliable methods for its prevention and detection in students’ assignments remain elusive. Contract cheating in academic assessment has been the subject of much recent debate and concern. Although some scandals have attracted substantial media attention, little is known about the likely prevalence of contract cheating by students for their university assignments. Although rates of contract cheating tend to be low, criminological theories suggest that people who (...) employ ghostwriters for their assignments are likely to re-offend, and little is known about re-offence rates in this form of academic misconduct. We combined previously-collected datasets and conducted additional, and previously-unreported, analyses on self-report measures of contract cheating prevalence. We found that few students, on aggregate, ever engaged in contract cheating but this varied substantially among samples. Of those who ever engaged in contract cheating, 62.5% did so more than once. The data also suggested that engagement in contract cheating is influenced by opportunity. These figures may help policy makers, and researchers who are creating contract cheating detection methods, to estimate base rates of contract cheating and the likelihood of re-offence. (shrink)

Land-based climate mitigation schemes such as REDD+ imply the creation of ‘rights to carbon’ for actions that enhance carbon sinks. In many cases, the legal and normative foundations of such rights are unclear. This article focuses on special rights on the basis of improvement. Considering improvement in relation to carbon sinks requires asking what it means to ‘improve’ an environmental resource. Our answer departs in two significant respects from the standard conception of improvement, namely by reconceiving action in relation to (...) ecosystem services, and accordingly, making the case for a counterfactual baseline to be used to compare an improved and unimproved state. Our modifications potentially allow for a variety of agents to claim special carbon rights on the basis of beneficial interactions with land-based carbon sinks. We give three archetypical examples of agents who may claim pro tanto special rights to carbon based on their interaction with carbon sinks. (shrink)

Chris Armstrong argues that attempts at justifying special claims over natural resources generally take one of two forms: arguments from improvement and arguments from attachment. We argue that Armstrong fails to establish that the distinction between natural resources and improved resources has no normative significance. He succeeds only in showing that ‘improvers’ are not necessarily entitled to the full exchange value of the improvement. It can still be argued that the value of natural and improved resources should be distributed on (...) different grounds, but that the value of improvements should be conceived differently. (shrink)

This book questions what sovereignty looks like when it is de-ontologised; when the nothingness at the heart of claims to sovereignty is unmasked and laid bare. Drawing on critical thinkers in political theology, such as Schmitt, Agamben, Nancy, Blanchot, Paulhan, The Politics of Nothing asks what happens to the political when considered in the frame of the productive potential of the nothing? The answers are framed in terms of the deep intellectual histories at our disposal for considering these fundamental questions, (...) carving out trajectories inspired by, for example, Peter Lombard, Shakespeare and Spinoza. This book offers a series of sensitive and creative reflections that suggest the possibilities offered by thinking through sovereignty via the frame of nihilism. This book was originally published as a special issue of Culture, Theory and Critique. (shrink)

Doing Philosophy provides a practical guide to studying philosophy for undergraduate students. The book presents strategies for developing the necessary skills that will allow students to get the most out of this fascinating subject. It examines what it means to think, read, discuss and write philosophically, giving advice on: Reading and analysing philosophical texts Preparing for and participating in seminars Choosing essay topics Constructing arguments and avoiding plagiarism Using libraries, the internet and other resources Technical terms, forms of expression and (...) logical notation The second edition is fully revised and expanded throughout, packed with practical exercises, useful examples and fully up-to-date resources. It also features for the first time a full companion website with additional resources and a range of pedagogical tools and activities designed for students and lecturers to use both in the classroom and in seminar preparation. Concise and accessible, Doing Philosophy equips the student with the tools needed to successfully engage in discussing, reading and writing philosophy. (shrink)

Spinoza is widely regarded as either a God-forsaking atheist or a God-intoxicated pantheist, but Clare Carlisle says that he was neither. In Spinoza's Religion, she sets out a bold interpretation of Spinoza through a lucid new reading of his masterpiece, the Ethics. Putting the question of religion centre-stage but refusing to convert Spinozism to Christianity, Carlisle reveals that "being in God" unites Spinoza's metaphysics and ethics. Spinoza's Religion unfolds a powerful, inclusive philosophical vision for the modern age--one that is (...) grounded in a profound questioning of how to live a joyful, fully human life. Like Spinoza himself, the Ethics doesn't fit into any ready-made religious category. But Carlisle shows how it wrestles with the question of religion in strikingly original ways, responding both critically and constructively to the diverse, broadly Christian context in which Spinoza lived and worked. Philosophy itself, as Spinoza practiced it, became a spiritual endeavor that expressed his devotion to a truthful, virtuous way of life. Offering startling new insights into Spinoza's famously enigmatic ideas about eternal life and the intellectual love of God, Carlisle uncovers a Spinozist religion that integrates self-knowledge, desire, practice, and embodied ethical life to reach toward our 'highest happiness'--to rest in God. Seen through Carlisle's eyes, the Ethics prompts us to rethink not only Spinoza but also religion itself. (shrink)

How do people understand questions about cause and prevent? Some theories propose that people affirm that A causes B if A's occurrence makes a difference to B's occurrence in one way or another. Other theories propose that A causes B if some quantity or symbol gets passed in some way from A to B. The aim of our studies is to compare these theories' ability to explain judgements of causation and prevention. We describe six experiments that compare judgements for causal (...) paths that involve a mechanism, i.e. a continuous process of transmission or exchange from cause to effect, against paths that involve no mechanism yet a change in the cause nevertheless brings about a change in the effect. Our results show that people prefer to attribute cause when a mechanism links cause to effect. In contrast, prevention is sensitive both to the presence of an interruption to a causal mechanism and to a change in the outcome in the absence of a mechanism. In this sense, ‘prevent’ means something different than ‘cause not'. We discuss the implications of our results for existing theories of causation. (shrink)

For Aristotle, excellence is not an act but a habit, and Hume regards habit as ‘the great guide of life’. However, for Proust habit is problematic: ‘if habit is a second nature, it prevents us from knowing our first.’ What is habit? Do habits turn us into machines or free us to do more creative things? Should religious faith be habitual? Does habit help or hinder the practice of philosophy? Why do Luther, Spinoza, Kant, Kierkegaard and Bergson all criticise habit? (...) If habit is both a blessing and a curse, how can we live well in our habits? In this thought-provoking book Clare Carlisle examines habit from a philosophical standpoint. Beginning with a lucid appraisal of habit’s philosophical history she suggests that both receptivity and resistance to change are basic principles of habit-formation. Carlisle shows how the philosophy of habit not only anticipates the discoveries of recent neuroscience but illuminates their ethical significance. She asks whether habit is a reliable form of knowledge by examining the contrasting interpretations of habitual thinking offered by Spinoza and Hume. She then turns to the role of habit in the good life, tracing Aristotle’s legacy through the ideas of Joseph Butler, Hegel, and Félix Ravaisson, and assessing the ambivalent attitudes to habit expressed by Nietzsche and Proust. She argues that a distinction between habit and practice helps to clarify this ambivalence, particularly in the context of habit and religion, where she examines both the theology of habit and the repetitions of religious life. She concludes by considering how philosophy itself is a practice of learning to live well with habit. (shrink)

Progress -- Loss -- Return -- Amenability -- Citation tactics -- Affective subjects.

Research on embryo donation and receipt continues to grow, highlighting how specific national contexts shape views and experiences. The present article reports on a qualitative study on embryo donation and receipt in Australia. Interviews were conducted with 15 participants: embryo donors and those seeking to donate (6), embryo recipients and those seeking donors (3), people with embryos in storage or previously in storage (5), and egg donors where resulting embryos were donated to a third party (1). A deductive thematic analysis (...) identified four key themes: understandings of embryos as cells, potential children, and/or children; a focus on relationships between “siblings”; importance of language and “family words” in discussing relationships; and extended family members having difficulty understanding the concept of embryo donation. The article concludes with a consideration of the implications of the findings in terms of the practice of embryo donation and the policies that surround it. (shrink)

Clinical ethics committees aim to resolve conflict, facilitate communication and ease moral distress in health care. Dialogue in committee discussions is complex and involves a balance between implicitly and explicitly expressed values of patients, families and professionals. Evaluating effectiveness and concrete outcomes is challenging and most studies focus on broad benefits such as quality of care and reduction of unnecessary or unwanted treatments. In this paper we propose ‘physician satisfaction’ as a valuable outcome. We refer to the clinical ethics approach (...) followed at one large paediatric hospital in Australia, propose reasons for the often-expressed feeling of satisfaction and discuss why this feeling matters. We conclude that physician satisfaction is a valid measure of an effective ethics consultation because it implies the person has been listened to and respected by others, and has perhaps developed greater understanding of and insights into their own work and values, and those of others. (shrink)

Contract cheating is a major problem in Higher Education because it is very difficult to detect using traditional plagiarism detection tools. Digital forensics techniques are already used in law to determine ownership of documents, and also in criminal cases, where it is not uncommon to hide information and images within an ordinary looking document using steganography techniques. These digital forensic techniques were used to investigate a known case of contract cheating where the contract author has notified the university and the (...) student subsequently confirmed that they had contracted the work out. Microsoft Word documents use a format known as Office Open XML Format, and as such, it is possible to review the editing process of a document. A student submission known to have been contracted out was analysed using the revision identifiers within the document, and a tool was developed to review these identifiers. Using visualisation techniques it is possible to see a pattern of editing that is inconsistent with the pattern seen in an authentic document. (shrink)

This study investigated whether temporal clustering of autobiographical memories around periods of self-development would also occur when imagining future events associated with the self. Participants completed an AM task and future thinking task. In both tasks, memories and future events were cued using participant-generated identity statements . Participants then dated their memories and future events, and finally gave an age at which each identity statement was judged to emerge. Dates of memories and future events were recoded as temporal distance from (...) the identity statement used to cue them. AMs and future events both clustered robustly around periods of self-development, indicating the powerful organisational effect of the self. We suggest that life narrative structures are used to organise future events as well as memories. (shrink)

Clare Chambers argues that marriage violates both equality and liberty and should not be trecognized by the state. She shows how feminist and liberal principles require creation of a marriage-free state: one in which private marriages, whether religious or secular, would have no legal status.

Hospitals are places where patients are unwell, where patients and their families may be upset, confused, frustrated, in pain, and vulnerable. The likelihood of these experiences and emotions manifesting in anger and aggressive behaviour is high. In this paper, we describe the involvement of a clinical ethics service responding to a request to discuss family aggression within a rehabilitation department in a large paediatric hospital in Australia. We suggest two key advantages of involving a clinical ethics service in discussions about (...) how to respond to family aggression. First, the process of ethics deliberation provides an opportunity for clinicians to be involved in the solution by articulating their perspectives, tolerance levels, and general concerns about the effects of family aggression towards staff. Second, supporting clinicians to articulate and identify the impact of parental aggression directly counters the disadvantages of the more blunt zero-tolerance policy response, which is necessarily imposed from the top down. (shrink)

I introduce a perceptual phenomenon so far overlooked in the philosophical literature: ‘visual evanescence’. ‘Evanescent’ objects are those that due to their structured visible appearances have a tendency to vanish or evanesce from sight at certain places and for certain ‘biologically apt’ perceivers. Paradigmatically evanescent objects are those associated with certain forms of animal camouflage. I show that reflection on visual evanescence helps create conceptual room for a treatment of looks statements not explicit in the contemporary literature, one which takes (...) its cue from the relatively neglected philosophy of perception of G.E.M. Anscombe. In sensory contexts in which evanescence is known to have occurred, the use of ‘looks invisible’ seems to be intelligible, a fact that sensationalist and objectivist treatments of the nature of looks, as I call them, cannot obviously accommodate - at least, as I explain, when coupled with what Cora Diamond (1981) describes as a ‘natural’ understanding of nonsense. Focusing on a number of imaginative scenarios in which the statement ‘looks invisible’ is permissible, I oppose these ontological treatments with the grammatical approach I draw from Anscombe and in doing so I uncover a degree of unity across the cases I consider: something can intelligibly be said to ‘look invisible’ if one can see or appears to see the entirety of the region that the ‘invisible’ thing occupies. The region ‘looks empty’ but is full. (shrink)

Autonomy is fundamental to liberalism. But autonomous individuals often choose to do things that harm themselves or undermine their equality. In particular, women often choose to participate in practices of sexual inequality—cosmetic surgery, gendered patterns of work and childcare, makeup, restrictive clothing, or the sexual subordination required by membership in certain religious groups. In this book, Clare Chambers argues that this predicament poses a fundamental challenge to many existing liberal and multicultural theories that dominate contemporary political philosophy. Chambers argues (...) that a theory of justice cannot ignore the influence of culture and the role it plays in shaping choices. If cultures shape choices, it is problematic to use those choices as the measure of the justice of the culture. Drawing upon feminist critiques of gender inequality and poststructuralist theories of social construction, she argues that we should accept some of the multicultural claims about the importance of culture in shaping our actions and identities, but that we should reach the opposite normative conclusion to that of multiculturalists and many liberals. Rather than using the idea of social construction to justify cultural respect or protection, we should use it to ground a critical stance toward cultural norms. The book presents radical proposals for state action to promote sexual and cultural justice. (shrink)

Real Language Series General Editors:Jennifer Coates, Jenny Cheshire, Euan Reid This is a sociolinguistics series about the relationships between language, society and social change. Books in the series draw on natural language data from a wide range of social contexts. The series takes a critical approach to the subject, challenging current orthodoxies, and dealing with familiar topics in new ways. Gender and Discourse offers a critical new approach to the study of language and gender studies. Women moving into the public (...) domains of power traditionally monopolised by men are creating new identities for themselves, and the language that is used by them and about them offers an insight into gender roles. Clare Walsh reviews the current dominance/difference debates, and proposes a new analytical framework which combines the insights of critical discourse and feminist perspectives on discourse to provide a new perspective on the role of women in public life. A superbly accessible book designed for students and researchers in the field, the book features: - topical case studies from the arenas of politics, religion and activism- a new analytical framework, also summarised in chart form so the reader can apply their own critical analyses of texts. - written and visual text types for the reader's own linguistic and semiotic analysis. 'This important book takes up a neglected question in the study of language and gender - what difference women make to the discourse of historically male-dominated institutions - and brings to bear on it both the insights of feminist scholarship and evidence from women's own testimony. Clare Walsh's analysis of the dilemmas women face is both subtle and incisive, taking us beyond popular 'Mars and Venus' stereotypes and posing some hard questions for fashionable theories of language, identity and performance. (shrink)

Re-encountering certain kinds of artworks in the present (re-listening to music, re- reading novels) can often occasion a kind of recollection akin to episodic recollection, but which may be better cast as ‘phasic’, at least insofar as one can be said to remember ‘what it was like’ to be oneself at some earlier stage or phase in one’s personal history. The kinds of works that prompt such recollection, I call ‘still lives’ - they are limited wholes whose formal properties are (...) stable over time. In the first part of the paper, I spell out a way of making sense of the peculiar power that certain artworks have to occasion such recollection – it is, as I explain, a power or ductus that derives from the form of the artwork, though possession of such a power is not limited to art. I then detail three dimensions along which episodic recollection and phasic recollection as occasioned by re-encountering ‘still lives’ differ: metaphysical, phenomenological, and descriptive. In the second half, I explore a challenge for my account of phasic recollection, which in turn helps make more vivid my proposal as well as the spectral analogy at the heart of it: Just as one can see regions behind one by looking in the direction of a mirror located in the same space in which one is, sometimes by re-encountering certain kinds of artworks now, past intervals or phases ‘behind one’ can be ‘made present’ in a way that the paper aims to make plain. I also explain to what extent phasic recollection might be understood as a form of mental time travel, and what the attendant phenomenology of ‘transportation’ involves. (shrink)

In a recent unit of study in an undergraduate Health Sciences pathway course, we identified a set of essays which exhibited similarity of content but demonstrated the use of bizarre and unidiomatic language. One of the distinct features of the essays was the inclusion of unusual synonyms in place of expected standard medical terminology.We suspected the use of online paraphrasing tools, but were also interested in investigating the possibility of the use of online language translation tools. In order to test (...) the outputs of these tools, we used as a seed document a corpus of text which had been provided to the students as prompt for the essay. This document was put through six free online paraphrasing tools and six separate iterative language translations through the online Google Translate™ tool.The results demonstrated that free online paraphrasing tools did not identify medical terminology as standardised or accepted nomenclature and substituted synonyms, whereas Google Translate™ largely preserved medical terminology.We believe that textual indicators such as the absence of standard discipline-based terminology may be of assistance in the identification of machine paraphrased text. (shrink)